> Isn't it strange that Prof. Vinge never wrote a non-fiction book about
> the Singularity or even about strong-AI? Perhaps he didn't write at
> length about the former topic because, as he has said more than once, he
> believes that the Singularity is a barrier as impenetrable to
> foreknowledge as a black hole. But I am still surprised that he has
> written so little about strong-AI, except for a few essays that suggest
> various ways it may come about and hint that it could even exist within
> the Net long before we recognize its presence.

There's emergence aplenty on the Net, but it's the wrong kind of
emergence. You have to engineer the processes, to arrive at an AI.
Bootstrap of an AI is a process requiring huge resources, because you have
to map the fitness landscape first. Most of it is barren, but you don't
know that in advance. The mapping will show up as a giant perversion blip,
a worm to end all worms, and with a very different signature from all
those gone before it. Notice that we're speaking about the Net a couple
decades downstream at least. Right now the hardware is ridiculous.

Even then, AI mentation show us as traffic. You can camouflage some of it,
if you 0wnZ the routers, but keeping a big crowd of minds hidden, so that
it doesn't even show in blinkenlights and slowdowns, that's a nice trick.